I had mentioned in a comment on Drew's recent post about acceptance and hope that our culture needs a modern revival of 'Ars Moriendi' which is really more about a different philosophical/spiritual approach to life and death and not about what medicine can or cannot do.

The book 'Republic of Suffering' is a great example of a major shift in how a culture views dying. It is about the American Civil War.

Christian, a revival of the ars moriendi, "art of dying," is a good idea, but I'm not sure how this can be accomplished. So much of our culture is oriented toward "the science of not-dying," whatever that is in Latin. Also, I'm concerned that the idea of the "good death" may be a Christian (religion, not you personally) Anglo idea, and anathema to other cultures. In Chinese culture, for example, discussion of death is so avoided that even words that sound vaguely like death have negative connotations.

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